Dust

Image of Spalding Butterfly Collection courtesy of mark6mauro

Bear with me while I mix metaphors recklessly as I try to pin my feelings down long enough to analyze them a little.

Pin them down -- as if my feelings were pretty butterflies, tragically pinned to a board in some collector's den, their lives of sunshine, flowers and flight cut short and sacrificed to knowledge that is, after all, pointless.

I've been criticized in the recent past for being too analytical, or perhaps it was for being analytical at the wrong time. Not everything requires analysis, so someone said to me.

When I think of the butterfly analogy, I realize there might be some truth to that.

I realize how tenuous attraction is -- a fragile and delicate thing that it can't really bear up under the collector's scrutiny. Pinned down, it is likely to crumble into fine dust and blow away on the slightest wind.
The biggest mystery I have ever known is my own heart. The closer I look, the more unknowable it is. With a heart this unknowable, it's a wonder I get anything done at all.

The only solid thing I have ever discovered there is the love for my children.

Outside of that, however, everything is a contradiction. I want to be safe at the same time I want to be free. I am fiercely independent but also lonely. I am always walking away even while I'm approaching.
Attraction is fragile, oh-so fragile, maybe nothing more than a trick of the light, as it turns out.

All it takes is the slightest shift in perspective, and your precious dreams, built up over the course of a year, vanish -- dusty smudges on your hand after you try to catch butterflies.